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The main purpose of this paper is to present the results of an investigation about functioning of tag questions in oral corpus of Chilean Spanish from a systemic-functional language perspective. The categories of interpersonal analysis are derived from the semantic-discursive and lexicalgrammatical strata. In the meaning stratum, the speech function and the semiotic commodity have been considered, while in the coding stratum, the clause modes and the location of the tag question in the clause have been considered. It is concluded that the tag question is a productive resource for the expression of interpersonal meanings in all speech functions. It is mostly integrated in moves that fulfill the role of 'give', while the main subject of negotiation is 'information'. Within the MOOD system, they are mostly integrated in final position of declarative clauses and to a lesser extent in imperative and interrogative clauses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to describe the prosodic features --nuclear pitch configurations and pitch range-- of neutral and oriented interrogative utterances in the Spanish of Mexico City. We carried out a study of polar and wh- questions recorded in the free conversation module of the Corpus Norma Lingüística Culta (Lope Blanch 1971) and Habla Popular de la Ciudad de México (Lope Blanch 1976). The findings of the qualitative analysis show: i) the nuclear pitch configuration L* (L)H% --with the variants L* (L)H%, L* ¡H%, !H* ¡H%-- in information-seeking yes-no questions and confirmation questions, ii) the nuclear configuration L* L% documented in neutral wh- questions, and the boundary tone H% produced in the non-neutral condition --hypothetical or confirmative-- of the utterance; iii) the use of the pitch range as a potential prosodic resource for the expression of lesser or greater knowledge about the expected answer. The spontaneous speech data partially confirm the descriptions based on discourse completion tasks for this variety of Spanish (de-la-Mota et al. 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an interactional analysis of discourse-connective que-constructions in Spanish. In particular, we discuss how these constructions operate at discourse level and we analyze the kind of interactional activities conversation participants are engaged in while using them. In previous studies, initial que has been described along the following lines: as an expletive element, as a marker of background information, as a modal particle, as signaling the presence of the speaker, and as part of a quotative construction. Nevertheless, analyses of free-standing que-constructions are usually based on subjective data from introspection and tend to focus only on the clause introduced by que, regardless of its discourse context. Our hypothesis is that the meaning of discourse-connective que-constructions is primarily indexical: they refer to a relevant piece of contextual information that can be retrieved from a previous utterance or turn, a previous discourse situation, a proposition being observed or one that is inferable from the speech situation. This paper helps define the discourse contexts where que-constructions are used more precisely, while also providing a description of the situated meanings que-constructions express in particular types of context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper attempts to establish the evidential character of the special prosodic configuration associated with direct reported discourse (DRD). A variety of expressive meanings have been commonly attributed to this marked prosodic configuration of DRD (such as expression of stance, emotion, mimicking, alignment). However, the concurrence of pragmatic/expressive meanings together with evidentiality is very frequent in ‘non-evidential’ languages like Spanish. Therefore, we argue that the prosody in DRD also signals ‘reported’ or ‘quoted’ discourse and, therefore, the presence of evidentiality. To provide evidence for this latter claim, 449 instances of DRD have been extracted from a corpus of (Iberian) Spanish colloquial conversations containing c. 150,000 words, and their prosodic behaviour has been observed. The data reveals a marked prosody in the majority of DRD instances in our corpus. Especial attention has been paid to the examples of DRD with no explicit introductory marks (e.g. verba dicendi ), since 100% of them are prosodically marked. Here, the marked prosody is the only indicator of the source of information. Consequently, it stops being a redundant trait (concomitant to the presence of introductory verbs or marks): it becomes prominent and its use is not optional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes bracketing (JUBRAN, 1996, 2006b), based on the text-interactive perspective (JUBRAN, 2006a, 2007), in data from a written Spanish conversation mediated by computer in a learning virtual environment - the educational chat - for Brazilians. We observe that bracketing is one of the regularities in the text construction in the chat analyzed. We verifity that bracketing is, therefore, a strategy of text construction, and a very productive one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents an examination of the expression of subject and topic in conversation, using parameters established by Centering Theory. Based on a corpus analysis of English and Spanish casual conversations, we show (i) under what circumstances the subject and the topic of an utterance coincide (‘topic’ is defined, according to Centering, as the backward-looking center of an utterance); and (ii) what referring expressions are used to encode subject and topic. We found that the Cb is realized as subject most of the time (80% of the utterances in English and 73% in Spanish), showing that topichood and subjecthood tend to be assigned to the same entity. The preferred realization for the Cb in those cases is a pronoun in English and a zero pronoun in Spanish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Turn-taking is usually considered to follow a simple set of rules, enacted through a perhaps more complicated system of signals. The most significant aspect of the turn-taking process is that, in most cases, it proceeds in a very smooth fashion. Speakers signal to each other that they wish to either yield or take the turn through syntactic, pragmatic, and prosodic means. In this paper, I explore how the turn-taking process develops in two different sets of Spanish conversations. In the first group of conversations, speakers take turns spontaneously, presumably as they would do in everyday situations. In the second group, turns were mechanically controlled, and communication was one-way. A comparison of the two types of conversation provides insights into the signals used in spontaneous turn-taking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The present paper is a study of the way informants and interviewers make use of interactive resources in the joint construction of semi-structured interviews. It is shown that accountability, understood as the natural disposition of respondents to provide an account of what they are doing and saying, is a powerful instrument in negotiating and verifying the collective production of meaning in this particular type of ‘conversation’. The article is based on first-hand data collected from interviews with native speakers of Spanish and Danish. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]